AW249 - The 19th-century foundations of Classical Greek warfare, with Roel Konijnendijk

Ancient Warfare Podcast

The History Network

Society & Culture, Greece, Warfare, Ancient, Rome, History, Military

4.4 • 631 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Murray talks with Roel Konijnendijk about his recent work on 19th-century German language scholars and how they laid the foundations of much of the 20th century's understanding of Classical Greek warfare.

Giants like Moltke, Delbrück, Kochly and Rustow's foundations were, however, based on 19th-century understandings of how war worked, and their views (rightfully) have been challenged. This only began in earnest in the late 20th century, and overcoming the dominance of these 19th-century thinkers is still a mountain to climb.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone, it's Murray here. I'm by myself, but I am interviewing Royal Kinanidey today
0:10.5	about his current work and what he's doing scholarship-wise, and we've got lots of things to cover.
0:15.5	We were about to kick off just off air, and it was like, oh, we should probably record this.
0:20.7	So, Roel, what have you
0:21.7	been up to? Uh, yes, thanks, Mary. Thanks for having me. Um, so what I've been up to the last
0:25.8	couple of years is a study of historiography, which is, it sounds awfully boring. It sounds like
0:30.7	navel gazing, but basically looking at how historians have in the past studied a particular
0:36.3	part of history,
0:39.7	how they've written about it where their ideas come from.
0:42.4	And specifically, I'm talking about Greek warfare.
0:44.9	Obviously, my field is classical Greek warfare.
0:47.5	I'm interested in the developments and the nature of Greek warfare and how Greek ways of war respond to those of their neighbors.
0:52.0	And the interesting thing that I found when I was doing research into Greek warfare
0:56.4	properly, you know, the actual subject was that I found that a lot of our ideas about
1:01.8	that history.
1:04.6	Don't necessarily come directly from the way that the sources tell the story.
1:08.0	They don't come from the way that, you know, Herodotus or
1:11.1	Thicinidis or Xenophon describe what the actual fighting looked like or how armies were organized.
1:16.2	But it comes from sort of legacy ideas from earlier historians. So they come to it with a certain
1:22.8	interpretation of this is what it must have been like. And we just kind of build on that.
1:27.1	And so for a very long period of time,
1:29.3	until really a few decades ago
	...

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